Top Trends of Digital Transformation for Energy and Utilities

Energy Business Review | Sunday, January 16, 2022

As they use the fast-evolving environment, oil and gas companies continue their digital transformation journeys to drive growth, productivity, efficiency, and safety over their operations. As the industry's technology adoption keeps advancing, their efforts to explore and forge new business models have also developed accordingly.

Oil and gas companies globally are going through widespread change. On the one hand, the significant price volatility as shifting geopolitical dynamics sees the supply-and-demand equations diverge in various geographies.

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On the other hand, conversely, it is essential to comply with growing environmental regulations designed to help de-carbonization. As a result, an increasing inclination for oil and gas companies is to build partnerships and collaborative arrangements in supply chain integration, logistics transportation, trading, and payments.

Four principal technology trends that play a key role in shaping enterprises' tactics for delivering growth against the technological background are:

1. The Rise of the "Cloud-First" Strategy:

Most oil and gas firms are now going to cloud-based platforms where they can congregate their business applications associated with areas like sub-surface, land, and production systems. Any innovation or workload projects are mostly taken up in the cloud, where IT-enabled infrastructure management administers data interfacing, on-premise legacy systems, and security management. The sector expects greater control and self-sufficiency ever to be given by AI and analytics applications within a few years.

2. Digital Representation of Physical Assets:

"Digital twin" and APM(asset performance management) programs are set to unite, driving the development of innovative solutions for managing vital resources across upstream and downstream operations. As companies' advance in asset management focuses increasingly on risk and reliability, long-term programs and initiatives are being launched to ingest, manage, and interpret asset operational data and performance key performance indicators (KPIs) in real-time.

3. Adoption of IoT Devices and Edge Computing:

Oil fields will increase their acceptance of sophisticated sensors, with a hefty proportion of the resultant data collected from edge computing devices. As a result, new data interface protocols are created to enable the data to be shared and synergized on the IoT platforms.

4. Renewed Focus on Data Technologies:

Today, AI systems and business analytics are scaling rapidly, and accessibility to historical labeled data for model testing and training. AI bots and operators will make asset maintenance decisions within a few years with minimal human intervention.

Blockchain technology applications are gaining momentum in oil and gas companies based on the IT department's data governance. As technological trends play out for oil and gas companies, they will help influence innovations in many business areas.

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